FDA and MIT announced a collaboration, building on systems designed to anticipate infectious disease spreads, to predict problems with prescription medications:

The current system relies on the largely manual assessment of reports voluntarily submitted to the FDA, sometimes months or years after an event has occurred. As a result, potential problems typically are underreported, said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the FDA‘s deputy commissioner for scientific and medical affairs.

The system would build on methods developed to identify infectious disease outbreaks, detect bioterrorism attacks and model the spread of bird flu, he said.